Peeping Big Brother

When officials in Shenzhen get caught spying on naked women, don’t expect contrition from the government

By Simon Parry / DPA , SHENZHEN, CHINA

It’s nightfall in China’s most watched city. Women nervously draw tight their curtains, fearful that the cameras that record their daily trips to the office and shops will pry into their homes and secretly film their most intimate moments.

It is no empty fear. Shenzhen, a city of 12 million on the border with Hong Kong, is at the heart of an experiment by the national government to monitor its vast population with the latest closed-circuit television (CCTV) technology — and the boundaries of the experiment are being questioned.

More than 200,000 high-tech cameras disguised as lighting columns have been set up at main streets, shopping plazas, parks and highways, beaming live video to monitors in what was expected to become the world’s most extensive use of technology for social control.

From the moment you walk over the border from Hong Kong into the bustling city that just 20 years ago was a sleepy fishing village, high-tech cameras with a 360-degree scope follow you.

Within two years, Shenzhen was expected to have video feeding into a database from 2 million cameras — the highest concentration on the planet and four times more than London.

The experiment is part of a nationwide project called Golden Shield, designed to tighten social controls with the use of video technology, much of it imported from major Western firms as security for the Beijing Olympics.

In Shenzhen, according to Deputy Police Chief Shen Shaobao (申少保), the experiment is already paying golden dividends. Crime rates have fallen by more than 10 percent and police detection rates have risen by 2.6 percent since the army of silent sentries began surveillance duty in 2006.

The appearance of lamppost-style security cameras across the city was not challenged — until an incident in May stoked concerns that the technology might be a double-edged sword.

At the Wang Ye Gardens apartment block 3km from the Hong Kong border, residents noticed that a rooftop surveillance camera on a neighboring block supposedly monitoring traffic swiveled around from midnight to 5am every day and trained its high-powered lens through their windows.

A local journalist monitored a government Web site on which CCTV footage from cameras across the city was made openly available and saw that the camera was scanning the apartment block for lighted windows and filming naked women in their bedrooms and bathrooms. The revelation almost caused a riot.

“People were very, very angry,” a spokesman for Wang Ye Gardens management said. “Some of them wanted to go out and smash all the CCTV cameras. They are still very unhappy about the cameras — but they are government property, and we can’t move them.”

Instead, it served as a wake-up call to the extent to which public surveillance had developed.

“It is like the Big Brother era in 1984,” said Li Xiang, an estate resident. “After this incident, I realized that as soon as you step out of your door in this city, you are under CCTV surveillance.”

It is not only the residents of Wang Ye Gardens who are concerned about the pervasive use of CCTV cameras. Human rights groups said they fear the technology would be used to identify and arrest dissidents.

“Activists aren’t just followed by secret police in Shenzhen now,” said one Hong Kong-based activist who meets regularly with underground labor rights groups in China. “They are concerned that they are followed everywhere by CCTV cameras as well.